"Obscura" - Multimedia Installation by Peter Kusek

09/12-10/01

8:00 am-6:00 pm

Ramsey Library - Blowers Gallery

Obscura, a new multimedia installation by Peter Kusek, will open in Blowers Gallery at UNC Asheville’s Ramsey Library on Tuesday, Sept. 12. The exhibition will be on view, free and open to everyone, 8 a.m.-11 p.m. weekdays, and 10 a.m.-6 p.m. on weekends through Oct. 1.

Kusek, a lecturer on the faculty of UNC Asheville’s New Media Department, says his exhibition is “part curatorial and part post-photographic remix, using a collection of mid-century newspaper negatives and radically re-working the images.”

The collection is housed in Ramsey Library Special Collections & University Archives. “My source images existed only as negatives for the last 50 to 80 years and haven’t been seen publicly until now,” says Kusek. “I saw this as the basis for a new narrative – transcoded images of people displaced by time that are in a visual dialogue with each other as mediatized ghosts, much in the same way that in social media, the images of people who pass exist alongside the images of the living.”

Kusek uses digital artifacts, blurs and glitches to signify a transformation that still bears traces of their analog origin. Fused together, the visual effect is that of simultaneously abstracting the past and creating new forms. Printing the images back to film for the Obscura installation completed this process.

Prior to teaching at UNC Asheville, Kusek worked as a digital archivist at the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive while earning his MFA in film, video and new media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.